They were devoted to one another for fifty-three years until Nell died of cancer in 1985.

After his wife’s death, Wooden had a ritual that on the 21st of every month—Nell’s birthday—after visiting her graveside, he would write a letter and place it on the pillow on her side of their bed. It would stay there for one month until once again he visited her grave, wrote a new letter, and placed it on her pillow.

He did this every month from 1985 until a few months before his own death in 2010.

For nearly 25 years, Wooden honored the memory of his wife with a simple dedication.

I like this post. I have studied a bit about personality types and your right, some are better skilled at leading loud, but half are not. The truth is the quiet ones probably get better results but they take that bit longer.

Society rewards success now. Its about getting the fastest return on investment.

But I do note, that some people have a lot more trouble focusing on acting. I would say there are some people who are born to be action orientated, others are not. While some of the ‘are not’, they learn to be in an acceptable (to them – I would call this effective mentoring and coaching skills) way, others don’t.

I also feel that some people struggle to see the future, and some struggle to believe what they envisage in the future could become true, and perhaps others might belief the vision they can see is possible but they don’t have the self esteem to start the journey or the self confidence to believe they can complete the journey, or the self control to stay on the journey.

I don’t know if pessimism is a personality trait or if it is learned, but unlearning pessimism may or may not be possible and certainly won’t be easy. Just as optimistic people easily put external factors down to good outcomes, I believe pessimistic people can easily put good outcomes down to external factors (luck, help)!

I haven’t done the research but I speculate pessimistic people are less likely to act on goals. Although I speculate their pessimistic nature allows them to better preempt risks and therefore mitigate them. Paradoxically this skill may be why the are pessimistic in the first place! They readily see the risks and challenges, I speculate optimists don’t readily see the obstacles and challenges or don’t even look – preferring to deal with them when we get there (learning from their mistakes and doing better next time). (Perhaps pessimism and optimism are highly related to learning styles).

Anyway the point I have really not made is, some people, pessimists or otherwise, need to be taught how to learn from failure in order to act. How to re-structure their self talk to be more confident. It is not a natural skill for them!

Whether it is nurture or nature they fail to ACT (analysis paralysis and other issues), while easily ticking all the other boxes.